Want States to Pay for Climate Resilience? Don’t Sue Them for Trying

Cancel culture is all the rage in the Trump administration. From late night hosts to green energy projects, when the feds deem something objectionable, they’ve been quick to shut it down.

This is as true for the country’s first Climate Superfund laws as it is for Jimmy Kimmel. With a flurry of legal filings, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is maneuvering to invalidate statutes passed by New York and Vermont that aim to raise billions of dollars from oil and gas majors to pay for much-needed adaptation projects.

On August 29, the DOJ filed a motion for summary judgement in a district court in New York as part of its lawsuit against that state’s Climate Change Superfund Act, which was signed into law last December. And just this Monday (September 15), the department filed a similar motion in another district court against Vermont’s Superfund, which was the first to be established in the country. In both cases, the Trump administration’s goal is simple: to have the courts render the laws “invalid and unenforceable.”

It’s a significant — if not entirely unexpected — escalation of the federal government’s legal assault on states’ climate policies. In April, President Trump signed an executive order directing the Attorney General to challenge laws that could affect “domestic energy resources”, prioritizing those addressing climate change. The DOJ filings serve to put this order into effect.

“I think it is a sign of aggression,” says Rachel Rothschild, an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan Law School who specializes in environmental law. “It is unprecedented in the environmental context for the Department of Justice to sue states in this way — they've never done anything like this before over any other state environmental law.”

However, the legal attack also exposes a contradiction at the heart of federal disaster policy. President Trump — through his rhetoric and executive orders — has made clear that primary responsibility for financing resilience against extreme weather events should rest with states and local governments. Yet by targeting the Superfunds, his administration is undermining one of the key mechanisms these governments could use to raise the necessary funds.

It’s a conflict that, if unresolved, could leave Americans even more vulnerable to climate disasters than before.